


You're Missing

by Lusa



Category: Torchwood
Genre: CoE Spoilers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-20
Updated: 2010-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-07 09:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lusa/pseuds/Lusa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking around the flat at the stupid illusion of a normality he would never have he realized dully that he couldn't take it anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Missing

**Author's Note:**

> It should also be noted that this is post-CoE, the ending of which I genuinely enjoyed, so if you somehow don't know what happens read no further!

In retrospect going to Ianto's flat had probably been a bad idea, or at the very least a pointless one. He'd lived and died and lost enough in his life to know it could only make things worse. Jack had lost more people than he could count – except of course he could count them, and name them and remember every face – in his impossibly long life, and he'd found it was usually easier to run away, to resolutely look forward and refuse to let it drag him down because he couldn't afford to. It should have been easy to do that this time, to throw himself back into the work of rebuilding Torchwood and dealing with whatever the rift spit out at them next. But easy never happened in his life, and it certainly wasn't going to this time.

He'd spent time here, but not enough for it to feel like home. Ianto's flat was meticulously clean, a combination of his personality and the fact that he had spent far more time at the Hub than here. A few dishes had been left to dry on a rack in an otherwise spotless kitchen, a coat hung neatly near the front door, pictures dotted a well organized bookshelf. All signs of life, but nothing real, nothing tangible, nothing that said a brave, wonderful man had lived here. It was all so ordinary it hurt to look at, this attempt at real life that hadn't really been a part of who Ianto was.

He'd been sitting slumped on the couch staring at nothing for years or minutes, trying not to look at the coffee maker on the counter or the picture of the two of them tucked in among images of Ianto's family on the end table. It was just another way of running, ignoring everything as hard as he could like that would make everything stop hurting, or freeze this moment in time so he wouldn't have to leave and deal with anything anymore.

He'd passed families on his way here, and looking at the expressions of grateful relief on their faces had made him want to scream. They would never know what he'd lost for them to be safe, for their children to survive, and he hated them for that. There wouldn't be some day of remembrance for Ianto or Stephen; no one would ever know and even if they did all they would feel was secret gratitude that it hadn't been their grandson, that, in the end, everything had turned out alright and gone back to normal and none of it would ever effect their lives again besides some bad memories.

The couch smelled like Ianto, and he didn't know if that made him want to leave or collapse on it. He was just tired, if that was even the best way to describe it. Exhausted to his soul, maybe. He'd replayed the past five days over and over in his head a thousand times, freezing on every decision that could have saved him, every moment that he could have changed, every word he'd said that had slowly marched him towards his doom. He couldn't remember the last time it had hurt to loose someone this badly and he hated the implication of that feeling. It was just another regret that nothing was going to change. Oh he could toy with ideas of calling the Doctor, of fixing his own wrist strap, of doing anything, really because unlike most people out there changing the past really was an option for him. That didn't mean it was going to happen, though. There were rules and anyway in the end life just wasn't fair.

They'd had sex on this couch, more than once. Not as often as, say, in his office, but the Hub was gone now like everything else and if he wanted tangible memories this flat was the only place left to go. He could remember the way Ianto had looked, the way he'd felt, every inch of the body he'd memorized over and over but he couldn't do it without it hurting, without his heart breaking all over again. It was like he'd lost the ability to feel anything but the giant, gaping hole in his chest that the other man had filled and even though he'd lost people he cared about again and again through the centuries at the moment he couldn't remember a single one of the tricks he'd learned to deal with it. He could not remember anything that didn't hurt.

He wished he could just turn himself off, just for a day, even an hour. But even now he had a self-appointed obligation to make sure the world was recovering properly from being saved, to take phone calls from people who only wanted to talk business – if what he did for a living could be called business – and politics. He had to see about recovering what he could from the ruins of the Hub, find out how much information Torchwood had lost. It hit him suddenly that Grey would have been killed in that explosion; his brother's frozen body had been stored right at the heart of it. One more loss. He had to deal with Gwen, too, because she'd be taking all this just as hard as him and he would need to pretend to be stronger than he was to help her get through it. He had to start thinking about recruiting new members and rebuilding for the next alien threat when all he really wanted to do was close his eyes and shut out the world. The most painful part was the knowledge of how much of that work Ianto would have taken care of for him, silently organizing and scheduling, taking care of the small tasks that always added up without Jack realizing. Jack might be the power center of Torchwood, but Ianto was what kept him running, silent and behind the scenes.

That wasn't the only reason he was important, of course. There was one mistake that Jack couldn't let go of, that was shredding his heart up into microscopic pieces and had been doing so for two days until he thought it was going to kill even him. He should have told Ianto he loved him. When those words left Ianto's pale lips he'd felt only terror, and couldn't bring himself to repeat them because that would have made all this real. As long as he didn't say it everything was going to be alright, he'd still be able to save the day like he was supposed to. I love you only meant goodbye in situations like this and he couldn't bear to admit that. Now though, he would have done anything to be able to change that one moment, to say what Ianto meant to him, to make it that one tiny bit easier on the dying man. But he'd been stupid and selfish and maybe he had died thinking he was just a fling, just another entry in Captain Jack Harkness's extensive back catalogue. He hadn't been.

Jack always knew what was coming when he let himself care about someone; sooner or later they were going to die and he would just keep on going into eternity. He'd known it when he'd asked Ianto out on that first date but he'd done it anyway. He just hadn't expected it to happen to a young man on a beautiful day that, aside from the threat of alien invasion, was fairly unremarkable. It wasn't supposed to be like that, not this time. He'd convinced himself he could keep him safe, that if he just paid attention and watched out for him it would all magically work itself out and they would have, well, more time together than they'd ended up with at least. But he would not have cared so much in the first place if Ianto hadn't been brave and good and willing to throw himself into danger time and again because it was the right thing to do. He had become Jack's conscious without either of them really realizing it and the moment he was gone what had he done? Murdered his grandson, alienated his daughter, and stopped caring about the people and the world he had worked so hard to save.

Looking around the flat at the stupid illusion of a normality he would never have he realized dully that he couldn't take it anymore. That this time he could not just get back up and keep going, keep on saving the world. He was tired of trying to save things, tired of being the hero. After all, weren't heroes supposed to defeat the monsters and get the girl – or boy, as the case may be – and live happily ever after? After a lifetime of refusing to believe in fairytale endings, he suddenly found himself angry for having his one chance at it snatched away from him.

Moving for what felt like the first time in years – he refused to check the clock hanging on the wall because if he was apart from time he had the right to ignore it when every second carried him farther away from Ianto – he pressed a few buttons on his wrist strap, already knowing he was going to regret this and not caring.

The look on John Hart's face when the grainy blue image of him sprung into life suggested he'd prepared some sort of cutting, witty comment, but Jack spoke up first because if there was anything he really wasn't in the mood for it was that. Or human contact of any kind, really but some things were impossible to avoid. "I need a lift."

For all his faults and shortcomings, John knew him well enough to see when to drop the lunatic act. He'd done it the last time they had seen each other, when he'd lost Tosh, Owen and Grey all in one day, and he knew for a fact he looked and sounded far more devastated now than he had then.

His old partner visibly swallowed his comments and put the prying questions on hold, instead just nodding and asking, "Where to?"

Jack shrugged, feeling the weight of his coat shift against his shoulders and swamped by a fresh wave of memories. _I really like that coat._ "Surprise me." It was an attempt at his usual dashing nonchalance and he knew it failed spectacularly.

Thankfully, John chose not to comment beyond, "Right. Be there in a few hours," before hanging up to finish whatever – or whoever - he was doing and get to whatever ship he'd managed to steal or borrow since they last met. He knew how this would end, of course. He'd get a day of peace, maybe two then John would start asking probing, painful questions he didn't want to answer and he'd snap back. Then they'd have a fight and one of them would storm off but by then it wouldn't matter because by then he'd be somewhere, anywhere that wasn't here.

Until then he had nowhere else to go and didn't really want to leave anyway. It didn't take much effort to shift sideways until he was lying on the couch, still staring at nothing. The last time the two of them had been in this flat he'd cooked dinner and Ianto had teased him about having almost 200 years of culinary experience and still managing to burn it. They had ended up on the couch because sometimes he didn't feel like wasting the time it would take to get to the bedroom and Ianto never seemed to want to complain about that fact. He could vividly remember the way Ianto had looked, lying there on his back and staring up at him as Jack's fingers slid down his chest, undoing buttons and gliding along skin before slipping inside his trousers. The flush on his face, his uncharacteristically rumpled hair, the way his breath hitched under his touch. He'd loved being able to make him moan like that, loved the way he tasted when they kissed and the look of complete trust and happiness on his face.

That was what it had been about for him, in the end, Jack had reflected afterwards as he lay pillowed on his chest, their legs and feet all tangled together because he didn't want to sort them out. It wasn't about the sex or the kick he got out of having a sexy secretary – he'd always sort of wanted one – it was just having someone who knew the right questions to ask and when he just needed to talk or be alone, who could read him well enough to figure out when something was wrong and who knew him enough to know that there were some things he never wanted to talk about; sometimes he could get away with asking them anyways. He'd been alone for a hundred and fifty years and Ianto was the only one who really understood the implication of that entire statement. He hadn't been alone when they were together and now here he was, right back where he'd started only far worse off.

A few hours, John had said. He couldn't decide how fast or slow he wanted that time to pass and in any case that wasn't the sort of thing he had any control over. All he could do was wait here in this place with its stupid pretence at a normality neither one of them had ever had. He would have killed for that at the moment, for the two of them to just be able to have a simple, boring life without any aliens or inability to die or, worse, all too real mortality. But normalcy was out of the question, like it always had been for him, and he had to keep going even if he didn't want to. He was done saving the world, though. Because really, what was the point when you didn't have anyone worth saving left?


End file.
